Google officially announced late Monday that its Compute Engine is now Generally Available and ready for mission critical workloads.

The Google Compute Engine was first launched as public beta by Google in June 2012. When Google first announced the Compute Engine in 2012, the platform only supported the Debian and CentOS Linux distributions. Now that Compute Engine is generally available, support is expanding to including SUSE Linux as well as FreeBSD. There is also a limited preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

The General Availability of Google's Compute Engine also involves a set of price reductions. Google is now lowering Compute Engine pricing for virtual instance by 10 percent. The 1 CPU entry level standard virtual machine now costs $0.104 per hour, while the new 16 CPU standard virtual machine will set users back $1.659 per hour.